In the innovations of the Revolution, the Church and the clergy took, for what was believed to be the national good, their full and abiding share in the surrender of past privileges.
At Paris, at the instance of Mirabeau, they even acknowledged, in some measure, the principle of religious liberty, in its widest application.
The appalling massacres of September 2, 1792, fell heavily upon the clergy throughout France; of whom one hundred and forty were murdered at the Carmes alone.
The Archbishop of Arles on that eventful day gave utterance to the following devoted plea:
"Give thanks to God, gentlemen, that He calls us to seal with our blood the faith we profess. Let us ask of Him the grace of final perseverance, which by our own merit we could not obtain."
The Restoration found the Church in a miserable and impoverished condition. There was already a long list of dioceses without bishops; of cardinals, prelates, and priests without charges, many of them in prison.
Congregations innumerable had been suppressed and many sees had been abolished.
The new dioceses, under the Concordat of 1801, one for each department only, were of vast size as compared with those which had existed more numerously before the Revolution.
In 1822 thirty new sees were added to the prelature. To-day there are sixty-seven bishoprics and seventeen archbishoprics, not including the colonial suffragans, but including the diocese of Corsica, whose seat is at Ajaccio.
Church and State are thus seen to have been, from the earliest times, indissolubly linked throughout French dominion.